Kern Carter's Blog, page 50
March 21, 2022
Call For Submissions — The Highs And Lows
The further I get into my life and career, the more I notice that my journey comes in waves. Some of these waves are high and exhilarating — the thrill of leaving home for university, my first big contract, watching my daughter graduate — while others are so low I feel closer to underground than above it. Losing all of my scholarships when I dropped out of high school comes to mind. Not having any food when my daughter’s mother and I moved out on our own and having my uncle buy us groceries is another low point. The constant round of rejections when querying agents; all of this has made my life as unpredictable as the ocean itself.
Sometimes these highs and lows occurred at the same time. The birth of my daughter happened when I was most distant from my unapproving family. Those conflicting emotions were hard to decipher as a teenager and I struggled with my mental health, although I would never have articulated it that way back then.
But of course, this is about you. What have been the highs and lows in your own lives? Have they intersected? Have the highs outweighed the lows? Think life and career and let us know.
Same rules as always:You can submit to this or ANY of our past writing prompts. Just scroll through our previous newsletters. They’ll be marked “Call for Submissions.”If you’re already a writer for CRY, go ahead and submit.Be as creative as you want in your submissions. As long as you stick to the topic, we’ll consider it.Just because you submit doesn’t mean we’ll post. If you haven’t heard back from us in three days, consider that a pass.[image error]Call For Submissions — The Highs And Lows was originally published in CRY Magazine on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.
March 20, 2022
March 18, 2022
An Eternal Journey to Understand the Reality
Photo by Henry Be on UnsplashYour world seems to be right
Everything almost perfect
You feel the good vibe
Sometimes doubting if it is for real
Or it is going to burst like a water bubble
Still, you fall in love with the feel-good vibe
Somewhere in the deepest corner of your heart you know
That something is not real; something is tricking you
But you still seem to like the comfort of the unreal
Then one fine morning reality hits
It engulfs you like a scary monster
It hits you so hard that it makes you motionless
You will want to cry badly
But you don’t have the strength to shed tears also
'It is not possible.’ ‘It cannot be real.’
This is the mind chatter that you face the whole day
The cosmos will anyways teach you
Bring you on your soul path
When you seem to get distracted
When you feel the pain, you know something is not right
When you feel pleasant, you know it is right
Maybe this is the language of the cosmos
When I am in pain and despair, I try to understand what I could have done wrong
But my limited knowledge finds no answer
So I surrender to the universe to guide me to my destined path
Sometimes the universe will hit me hard
I will gather all the broken pieces to give a new life form
Then I will learn to smile
Then again the cosmos will hit me hard
Maybe this cycle will continue till the universe leads me to where I belong.
And till I reach there it is just the hide and seek game with the cosmos.
[image error]An Eternal Journey to Understand the Reality was originally published in CRY Magazine on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.
March 17, 2022
All Our Boring Lives Still Matter
Photo by Greyson Joralemon on UnsplashI read a lot.I read a lot of books, I read a lot on Medium, I read a lot of blogs, and get way too many “helpful” emails.
I’ve noticed a theme lately where a lot of what I’m reading is trying desperately to say the same thing in a different way, over and over again:
This is how I’ve succeeded.
This is how I’ve done it.
This is how I’ve won.
I’m tired of reading so many of these articles, you know?
The thing is, they are not helpful to me because the vast majority of these articles out there do not apply to me at all.
I am not a young man in my twenties who can get up before the crack of dawn to go get swole at the gym and then come home for a meditation session and a smoothie before he sits down to write about how he accomplished financial freedom without actually telling us how he’s making a living, ever.
No.
I’m a single mom who’s homeschooling her disabled tween, and so I don’t care how you’ve accomplished anything because there’s no way that your way is going to work for me.
You know what works for me? Reading true stories about people’s lives and seeing that there are others out there who share even just a little something with me.
And that can only be accomplished by telling me your why.
The best stories, the ones that affect me the most, and get me doling out 50 claps, are the everyday stories about things that happen in people’s lives and how those things change them, or why those things matter to them.
That interaction you had with the woman at the supermarket — how did that make you feel?
That time your dog died because of a stupid, careless mistake — what was that like?
When you can’t figure out if you’re in love or it’s just a hopeless crush — what the hell do you do?
Those are the things I like hearing about, those are the stories I enjoy reading the most.
I know the most mundane things in life can sometimes lead to the most extraordinary — and we don’t get to hear those stories if you let yourself believe that your stories don’t matter because you haven’t accomplished anything today.
This is something I have been struggling with my whole life when it comes to writing — it’s so hard for me to convince myself that my stories are worth telling and that there are people who will appreciate reading them.
I am not very accomplished at anything.
I’ve never won anything, not even a remarkable raffle.
I didn’t even graduate from college, though not for lack of trying.
Really, I have no place here to dole out anything but claps, I just wish a few more people out there would agree with me and stop trying to convince me they’re superior because they got out of bed before six in the morning.
Let there be a place on Medium for people who love to write about their boring, mundane lives.
Let there be a place for fiction and poetry, and even that weird, non-linear verse that no one understands.
Tell the stories that you think are going to bore the tears out of your readers, but also why you’re telling it, to pull the tears from those readers.
So, maybe we haven’t done much.
Our boring lives still matter.
Tell me what’s going on in your life.
Tell me why it matters.
I know that’s what I’m going to do.
Thank you for reading. I’d love it if you would follow me on Twitter and also here on Medium to keep in touch. 🙂
[image error]All Our Boring Lives Still Matter was originally published in CRY Magazine on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.
